When there was no answer, her brother said they should go back for him, so they did.
They walked back down the path, her brother taking the lead. She felt wobbly, a quiver in her stomach, tears threatening. She couldn’t even say why she was scared. What had they heard after all? Maybe nothing. They turned the corner to see the path empty. The rocky dirt surface was edged by trees that sloped down toward the river valley. “It’s not that steep,” her father had said. “But you could still fall a good ways and hurt yourself. So be careful.”
She was the first to hear the low moaning.
“Daddy!” she cried. “Daaaddddy!”
“Kids!” his voice was low and far away. He said something else, but she couldn’t hear what. They moved toward the sound, her brother edging toward the side of the path, looking down.
“Stay back,” her brother said. She pressed herself up against the trunk of a tree, feeling the rough bark through her shirt. Her father was still calling to them. It sounded like he was saying Get out of here! Run! But that couldn’t be right.
“I see him,” her brother said. “He must have fallen. Dad, what happened?”
Then another one of those strange echoing cracks. Her brother froze stiff, then grabbed his leg and started screaming, fell to the ground. It was a terrible sound, high-pitched and filled with fear. It connected to something deep and primal within her, and sheer terror rocketed through her, a lightning bolt. She heard herself shrieking, too, a sound that came from her and didn’t.
A black flower of blood bloomed on her brother’s thigh. He’d gone a frightening white, couldn’t stop screaming. It was a siren, loud and long, deafening. She wanted to cover her ears, to tell him to stop. Her father was yelling down below. Her name. Her brother’s name. Then a command as clear as day: Run!
She went to the edge of the path and saw her father lying among the trees, sloping downwards, arm looped around a slender birch trunk as if he was holding on, leg bent strangely. And then she saw the other man. Dressed in jeans and a flannel work shirt, heavy boots. He wore a baseball cap, the brim shadowing his face. In his arms he had a gun, long and black.
She froze, watching him. Her brother’s screaming had quieted; he was now whimpering behind her. Her father was yelling still. But she couldn’t move; she was so afraid, so confused, that her body just couldn’t move.
She heard something, a chiming. A little tinkle of bells. The phone. Her father’s phone was ringing. She turned and saw it down the path, screen bright, vibrating on the dirt path. It broke the spell, and she ran for it. She was fast. She was the fastest girl in her third-grade class, always pulling effortlessly ahead of everyone else on the soccer field at relay races in PE. Coach said she was a rocket. But she wasn’t fast enough today.
Another man, whom she hadn’t seen, was coming up the path from the opposite direction. He got there first, crushing the phone beneath his hard black boot as she dove for it, skinning her knees, the dirt kicking up so that she could taste it in her mouth.
He looked down at her, his expression unreadable.
“Don’t bother running,” he said. He sounded almost sad for her. “He’s got you now.”
But she did run. Her daddy had always told her if a stranger tried to take her that she was supposed to run and scream at the top of her lungs and fight with everything she had. Don’t ever let them take you, he warned. No matter what.
Why? she used to ask. The conversation frightened and excited her, like a scary movie. What happens if they take me?
Nothing good, said her father grimly. And the way he said it meant that the conversation was over.
She used to lie in bed at night sometimes, thinking of how she would get away from a bad guy that tried to take her away from her family. In those imaginings, she was always strong and brave, fiercely fighting and punching like the kids in Antboy and Kick-Ass (which she was way too young to watch but did with her brother on those nights when Mommy was working and Daddy was in charge).
It was nothing like this. She couldn’t breathe; fear was a black hole sucking every part of her into its vortex. Her brother was now yelling, too, telling her to run. And she did. She got up from the ground and she ran past the strange-looking man, leaving her brother and her father behind. She was going for help. She had to be fast, faster than she’d ever been. Not just for herself, but for her daddy and her brother.
How far did she get? Not far when a great weight landed on her from behind, bringing her hard to the ground, knocking all the wind out of her. There was a foul smell and hot air in her ear.
“You come like a nice little girl, and I won’t kill your father and your brother. I won’t go back and kill your mother, too.”
She couldn’t even answer as the man yanked her to her feet and started dragging her back up the hill—past her brother who lay quietly crying on the ground.